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Tejal Shah’s solo at Kashi Art Gallery

‘Pentimento,’ the solo show of Tejal Shah opened in November at Kashi Art Gallery, Kochi.
 
In this multi-media exhibition, Tejal Shah invokes troubling visual epistemologies, propounded by the medical establishment in 19th century Europe. During an artist residency in Paris (2007), Shah discovered the archive of the Salpetrier hospital, which consists of photographs of hysterical women. In actuality, these images mapped hysteria on the woman’s body, emphasized its ‘feminine’ nature and purported to create knowledge about it.

Both fascinated and troubled by this archive, Shah began the series of photographic recreations presented here. In the video installation, ‘00:00:20:27,’ (single-channel video installation/00.17:23:07 min/dimensions variable/colour with soung/2009) the body is not the disciplined body that must accurately and publicly project a condition; it is the body caught in duress, in privacy, and neither the doctor nor the viewer can impose control on it through the modalities of vision. Shah caps her solo by admirably capturing mental tensions in an abstract form in her kinetic sculpture, “When I am bored, all I do is make a red knot and look at it”.

Pentimento is a term used for changes or adjustments made in a painting, which leave behind traces of figures or objects that have been painted over. Seen together, all the works critique the archive and offer alternate ways of thinking about mental health. The exhibition’s title, then, becomes a metaphor for the artist’s methodology.

‘Encounter (s)’ an exhibition of photographs by Shah and Varsha Nair, also opened simultaneously at Kashi Art Café at Burgher Street in Fort Kochi.

The photographs presented in this show are based on a series of collaborative live performances that the Mumbai-based Shah and the Bangkok-based Nair developed via email exchange, where the artists shared their experience of the edge within everyday normality and loneliness within the teeming cities they live in.

Both shows will continue till December 12, 2009.

- From A Correspondent